Edward I
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Posts posted by Edward I
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A tentative welcome back to the realm of non-slot-fillers.
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19 minutes ago, ArcKnox said:
I find it amusing that you see giving viability to ground units as unbalanced, while the current meta of only planes matter perfectly fine.
>Downvotes
Popular mechanics are not always good mechanics. The reverse also holds true.
Ground units aren't unviable now and that's not what I said.
There are three big ways to balance the game that I typically see referenced:
1) "Realism" - This gets roundly criticized every time it's brought because it's a pretty dumb way to conceive of gameplay.
2) Balance around individual nations - This seems to be what you and Pre both had in mind for your respective proposals. It's definitely a relevant consideration, but probably isn't the most important and certainly isn't sufficient on its own.
3) Balance around groups - The main meta of PW centers around the actions of groups, namely alliances and coalitions of alliances. Balancing the needs and strategies of these larger groups is of paramount importance when considering mechanical changes, and this is precisely where both your and Pre's proposals fall short. As others outlined extensively in the thread I linked, "balancing" planes by nerfing them would unbalance the game by neutering nations' (and alliances') ability to effectively updeclare. The nominally unbalanced role of aircraft isn't a good enough reason to nerf updeclares. That line of thinking is analogous to demands to make the game more "realistic": where that complaint fails to understand that the game isn't meant to be a realistic simulation, the "planes are overpowered" complaint fails to understand the importance, if not outright primacy, of group play compared to individual play.
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10 minutes ago, Who Me said:
Considering what NPO domination has done to CN and that this war is exactly what they are trying to do here? I would say that having baseball around to help people keep fighting is a very good thing. Having another pile of shit that CN has become is not something anyone other than NPO or Goons would want.
While you may have been better organized and disciplined than your opponents, you were and are the biggest backstabbing paranoid !@#$ in the world there and will no doubt try and do the same thing here.
Yeah, no.
CN was harmed secondarily by people becoming apathetic and inactive (this trend long predated NPO's supposed destruction of the game), and primarily by crappy mechanics (tech in particular) as well as the rampant cheating incentivized by them and disregarded for years by CN's moderation (specifically multi rings farming tech).
NPO was one of the loudest voices opposing that type of cheating and played a prominent role in the outcry which precipitated a change in moderation practices towards a harsher, more punitive line on tech spawned by multi nations. Incidentally, the player accusing us of cheating over there (despite there being no evidence to support that claim) signed NPO's demands to the CN mods.
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The last time a suggestion to "balance" planes by allowing them to be attacked by ground units was made, the OP was probably the most downvoted post in the history of the forums.
This suggestion isn't identical to it, but the glaring balance problems associated with it are similar enough that I think most of the objections to that suggestion apply here as well.
I'm strongly opposed, and I suspect most of the replies to that suggestion would be as well.
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This seems like a clunky mechanic that's more or less redundant with war policies. I'm not in favor.
If it were to be implemented, the disruption to a nation's color from switching between beige and an original color would need to be addressed. There would also need to be a clear, user-friendly way of determining which nations on an alliance get the bonus.
Finally, and for the umpteenth time, you cannot utilize static alliance affiliations when designing mechanics. There are no meaningful restrictions on joining, leaving or creating alliances, so trying to restrict the use of a mechanic by referencing a nation's alliance affiliation makes no sense. Also, again for the umpteenth time, large alliance memberships are not a balance issue. It is not "unfair" that mass member alliances have more players than small alliances.
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4 hours ago, BelgiumFury said:
10% of all money currently in existance is Baseball Billions.
That's incorrect. The total net profit from baseball is roughly $60 billion, yes, but that wasn't all generated yesterday. It's spent at the same average rate as all other money in the nations in which it is generated, which means that most of it has been spent already over long stretches of time. The relevant number to compare it with would be the total money generated by all other economic activity since baseball was added as a feature.
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55 minutes ago, Micchan said:
NPO has 70 nations at 20 cities, their GDP with low infra is way higher than TCW/Fark who are full of whales with high infra, they are not anymore in the GOONS situation with many low tiers, it is the biggest conventional alliance for both military and economy (once they rebuild) in the history of the game, and I don't even count the pigs who are there just to boost their economy
/off topic
So? By this formulation, if these alliances split up and had smaller GDPs than [insert arbitrarily chosen alliance here] everything would be fine.
Like I said earlier, baseball is played by nations, not alliances. It’s not a “balance problem” that some alliances have more members than other alliances.
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Why does it matter how much baseball money was generated per alliance? Baseball games are played by nations, not alliances.
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Just now, Prefonteen said:
As opposed to the NPO hierarchy of treaties which is
NAP< ODOAP < MDP < MDoAP <MDAP < BKAh, I see you're once again feigning illiteracy regarding non-chaining clauses.
Regardless, you can rest easy now that we actually have an MDAP with BK. Your complaints have been received, and we believe this solution satisfies all of them.
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1 hour ago, Salt Meat said:
Just to make sure I'm not confused with who I'm talking to. Is this the same Cooper that recently tried to tell me that BK defending BoC with Camelot wasn't a defensive action? TLE hits us because someone 2 treaty chains away also hit us, and that's what you call entering defensively?
Sounds about right. Just remember that the TKR hierarchy of treaties is ODoAP > NAP > MDP and things should make more sense going forward.
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Another way to get basically the same thing would be a single checkbox to indicate that any cities above the specified infra level should stay as they are rather than sell infra down to the specified level. In other words, mass infra purchase becomes a "greater than or equal to" function instead of an "equal to" function.
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59 minutes ago, Cooper_ said:
Seriously man? You're working with people who have tried to destroy my community and you're asking how much I enjoy trying to fricking keep it together?
Not cool.
47 minutes ago, Changeup said:Stop trolling. We know you and (especially) your allies don't give a damn about us enjoying the game or the health of the game in general.
Unless your community is based on getting your way all the time - by winning wars, by seeing your preferred rules for diplomacy and warfare implemented, or in other ways - then there's no way any outsider can destroy your community. No one is entitled to see any particular style of game play adopted game-wide. The "health of game in general" isn't defined or dictated by you.
Although if you disagree, Changeup, I suppose you're right. We probably don't give a damn about your enjoyment if it's predicated on any of that stuff.
To answer the OP's question, I'm enjoying
- the drama
- the camaraderie in NPO and Coalition B as a whole
- watching whale pixels burn
- demolishing some of the worst parts of the old metagame, and possibly laying the groundwork for something better to replace them
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Death to the whales.
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14 hours ago, Roquentin said:
This is actually true since we have no real objective and it's all just drama between specific actors with no resolution, then it will breed hate and lying and so on.
That's something to consider in terms of adding something to the game where cooperation is encouraged or at least friendly competition rather than it being like some sort of gang war without any drugs involved. Ultimately if we always have to cannibalize each other, then it's going to be pretty negative.
Otherwise, nothing stops this train.
13 hours ago, Thalmor said:I don't know about this part. I've interacted with a lot of people in my 5 years of playing, and there's only 2 people I know who definitely fall into the 'clinically a sociopath' group. The game does attract a very narrow and 'interesting' set of people though.
I like the idea of having global events (like a zombie apocalypse or a massive asteroid) that will encourage alliances everywhere to pool resources together to prevent massive damage to infra/land/military/improvements. These events would also present opportunities for alliances to harm each other as well, though (to allow for drama).
I've thought a lot about the astroid one in particular. I should type my thoughts down and present it in the suggestions subforum.
13 hours ago, Epi said:Imo Zombies sounds amazing. There are so many ways you could do that. And make cooperation necessary, lest you get overrun. Inb4 you have sphere based Fortresses of reinforcement and trade. Fighting against the endless hordes...oh wait.
Not quite an event, but the suggestion has been made:
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@Zygon this is one of those one-in-a-hundred threads where your usual posting style will actually make sense in context. Choose your gif wisely.
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2 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:
How is active investigation of every report indicative of haphazard moderation?
Sorry an active admin that actually participates in the community upsets you so.
The rules should define what is and isn't slot-filling to the maximum extent possible. Significant "investigation" should be at a minimum because, ideally, rule-breaking should be disincentivized and readily apparent to begin with. The word of someone in a Discord message doesn't change what did or didn't happen in the game and should have no bearing on the moderation of said game in the first place.
Unless Discord usage becomes mandatory to play PW, it should play no part in moderator interactions with players concerning actions in-game or on the forums. I'm not annoyed about an active admin; I'm annoyed about an administration that gives even the appearance partiality to players who use Discord over those who don't. The former group tends to be louder and more inclined towards lobbying Alex to begin with, and this only encourages lobbying him about moderation actions.
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2 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:
I got reported for slot filling when I bought a treasure and raided the guy for it. Alex actually DM'd me on discord about it. It definitely gets looked into, even in questionable cases.
So moderation is haphazard and favors Discord-active players who've, presumably, interacted with Alex or the mods on Discord already and whose Discord handles are known to them.
Great. I'm happy to hear that your confidence in the moderation team is based on a style that better resembles personal diplomacy than it does the impartial, even-handed, formulaic practices that should be in place.
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4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:
While there have been similar coalitions, similar is not the same. Different alliances drop in and out. And there also is more variety in terms of strategies going in in how alliances come in, initial deployments, etc. The first couple of weeks of a war are the most exciting as things shake out even if it's a similar coalition to the previous war.
The first weeks of wars are fun, yes. Changing small facets of them for the sake of calling them different isn't a good reason to change the politics that lead to them.
4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:And while it doesn't always change, it at least has the CHANCE to change.
The odds of change without a decisive end to this war are vanishingly small. The attitude towards Coalition B and NPO in particular has been one of overwhelming IC and OOC hostility from the moment we entered until now. We have no reason to believe the people who told us we'd be torched for "ruining" minispheres, or who think we're "breaking" the game for [insert action from last six months here] will have a change of heart after the war. So, rather than negotiating a hollow peace in the full, reasonable expectation that Coalition A will rebuild and come back to fight the same war stronger and more organized, we're content to continue fighting until we get a satisfactory one.
If you want that dynamic to change, give us a reason to agree to peace that makes that outcome unlikely.
4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:A much greater chance than if there are fewer war-peace cycles.
I'm not arguing against IC politics driving that change. I'm saying that shorter war-peace cycles generally speeds up how fast IC politics play out.
You have an issue primarily with game mechanics then, not us. If decisive victories in wars were easier to obtain and longer wars were harder to sustain, there would be shorter wars. If both coalitions wanted to, for instance, collectively lobby Alex to implement meaningfully low soft caps on alliance and individual warchests, I imagine the implementation of such a mechanic would go a long way towards speeding up the war cycle. Unless and until a mechanic that limits the ability of alliances to wage protracted wars is implemented, though, the social side of the game will be constrained to happen at the pace of the mechanical side.
4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:How does this address what I said?
11 hours ago, Azaghul said:All this talk of "structural advantages" misses the POLITICS part of this world.
Game mechanics, including the structural advantages they create in conjunction with player actions, are the basis for the politics of the world. You can't possibly "miss" the politics by talking about them; at worst, the discussion will be incomplete.
4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:Elements of IQ and Syndisphere/EMC still have a rivalry of sorts. Others switched sides and switched around. Which is why alliances that formally fought NPO/BK like Syndisphere fought with you last war and this war.
Many of the alliances you say had a broad comity against you were literally fighting each other before the leaks of BK planning to attack them during rebuilding.
And those wars were explicitly framed as fun, friendly, rivalry-free engagements. Soup's first war was billed as "community outreach." Surf's Up happened shortly thereafter; the belligerents were the same people who had spent so much time praising the ethos of wars like the Soup-Fark one; and they made it pretty clear that they thought Surf's Up was an example of that ethos to be emulated by others. If it was a war that had anything to do with rivalry or IC disputes, the combatants had a funny way of showing it.
4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:1) Yes, upper tier nations are harder to fight. And EMC had greater revenues to work with. But my point is that game mechanics mean that greater revenues haven't translated into a proportional amount of greater military power because of disproportionate city costs. More cities per player can be and often has been balanced out by having more players.
2) Sitting out one war wouldn't have made up the gap in terms of high tier cities, but it would have gone a very long way towards catching up or even getting ahead on warchests. To the tune of hundreds of billions.
3) You didn't address the most important point: NPO has been on the winning side the last two wars. Politics, alliances switching sides, and up-declaring have more than cancelled out the "structural advantages" your opponents have had.
The idea that those "structural advantages" pose some kind of existential threat that make peace untenable for you if they aren't eliminated is pure paranoia. If they were so insurmountable, you wouldn't have been able to overcome them. The fact that you have been able to overcome them two wars in a row proves that they aren't the giant boogeymen that you are making them out to be.Obviously we've made some headway against the perennially superior upper tier forces arrayed against us and obviously they, in and of themselves, aren't an existential threat. Coupled with the attitudes of those nations' owners and of their alliances' leaders, though, yes, they are. If the almost sole use to which those nations are put is opposing NPO's spheres of influence, why should we treat them as anything but a perennial threat? If, absent substantial long-term planning and dedication on our part, their advantage spells perennial defeat for us in wars, why shouldn't we treat them as an existential threat?
In fairness to you, some of the advantage that upper tier grouping enjoys are the products of glaring balance problems in the game's mechanics. However, that doesn't negate the social reasons for the problem - upper tier consolidation - and it doesn't change the fact that, without changes to the mechanics or a newfound willingness of upper tiers to fight one another, we have no way of dealing with problem besides going after the whales every war.
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8 hours ago, Azaghul said:
Everything Roq says goes back to looking at what Frawley (NPO gov!) said so succinctly earlier:
The game is more interesting when the game it is allowed to evolve. Peace allows for the political cycle to begin again, new coalitions to form. Fighting different kinds of wars with different allies and different enemies every few months, as opposed to less than one war cycle per year, makes the game more interesting for most players. This is the "moral" basis for having shorter wars.
You fight it out and you shake hands and you move on.Being allowed to evolve and actually evolving are two different things. Peace doesn't necessarily lead to an "evolution" in politics and, more often than not, it hasn't.
There's nothing inherently good or bad about fighting multiple wars with or against similar coalitions. Ironically, change for its own sake here is the opposite of IC politics. If there isn't an animating IC reason - strategic, ideological, or social - to alter your alliance's diplomatic stance, then all that any change has done is to supplant IC politics with OOC notions. (Or, worse, with IC politics cynically disguised as OOC notions.)
I find the game more interesting when it's driven by actual IC politics, not the OOC knockoff that so regularly passes for it and which you endorse here.
8 hours ago, Azaghul said:All this talk of "structural advantages" misses the POLITICS part of this world. Hell many of the alliances Roq believe some kind of insurmountable lead were busy spending lots of resources fighting each other when BK and then NPO entered the picture. Roq was worried about EMC having structural advantages? Politics had divided EMC and NPO had major elements of EMC on their side in both Knightfall and then this war. NPO was on the winning side in Knightfall and was/is in this war. The idea that NPO would have been in an insurmountable disadvantage going into future wars is disproven by the fact that they weren't at an insurmountable disadvantage in either the last war or this war.
Structural advantages are inherently part of the politics of the world. Game mechanics and their long-term ramifications are intimately related to diplomacy. If your politics aren't motivated by material, mechanical realities (including structural disparities), ideology, or a desire for social status and prestige, then they're not IC and they're not really politics. Structural advantages are the politics of the world to a large extent.
8 hours ago, Azaghul said:The politics of these kinds of worlds is that even if people strongly dislike each other, after a while new rivalries and grudges form and people that would have never worked with each other before end up coming together to take on some common foe. Newer grudges end up taking precedence.
That's been more untrue than not because there haven't been the type of comprehensive victories/defeats or mutually amenable settlements to past conflicts to engender that sort of change. The reason why IQ and Syndisphere/EMC were in a state of alternating cold and hot war for years is that neither side could comprehensively defeat the other and both sides believed that continuing the long-term rivalry was their best strategic option. If either had been able to crush the other, it's possible something different would have emerged, although that probably could only have happened if the victory had led to infighting among the victors.
The ostensible settlement that ended the IQ-EMC rivalry wasn't a settlement so much as a half-baked papering over of the differences and disagreements between those two groups, and one which didn't have the universal trust or buy-in that its boosters claimed it did. That the zeitgeist of early 2019 looked almost exactly like the zeitgeist of EMC in 2017-18 - broad comity between most alliance leaderships, especially those of former EMC, and an explicit hope that NPO and BK would fight a pitched war against one another - should tell you pretty much all you need to know.
8 hours ago, Azaghul said:Two more reasons why the "structural advantages" argument against peace is idiotic:
1) A lot of the extra money EMC members made went into high level cities that have a far lower rate of return in terms of military capability than the cities mid tier nations buy. Game mechanics do an effective job of preventing runaway exponential growth from giving anyone an insurmountable lead in terms of military power. For the cost to build one nation from city 20 to city 30, you can build 3 new nations all the way up to city 20. Those three nations with 20 cities each are worth far more militarily to an alliance than those extra 10 cities for that 30 city nation.
A lot, but not all of it. A substantial portion of EMC's years of profit have gone into building larger warchests, probably in part because upper tier cities are more expensive. Furthermore, the parts that have gone into building more cities have still created a military advantage, regardless of the lower return rates. A nation with a significant advantage in cities is harder to fight no matter how expensive those cities were. Finally, it's not like NPO or other, relatively newer, relatively lower-tiered alliances had years of identical revenues to EMC that they spent more efficiently. Instead, they had years of lower revenues compared to EMC and had shorter periods in which to generate positive ROI for their infrastructure thanks to fighting more wars than EMC's upper tier.
Very little of this would be a problem if PW's upper tier powerhouses made a habit of actually fighting one another. If warfare had, over the long run, imposed a cost on upper tier nations proportionally equivalent to the cost it imposed on mid tier nations, then your comment on game mechanics would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. It's obviously not irrelevant - former IQ alliances have (slowly and incompletely) closed the gap with former EMC alliances - but it hasn't outweighed the impact of alliance politics over the years.
8 hours ago, Azaghul said:2) A lot of the "peace dividend" from "relatively easy wars" could simply have been balanced by NPO and co sitting out a war while everyone else fought. And theoretically still could if NPO sits out the next one.
Sitting out one war would not have balanced out the de facto, years long policy numerous upper tier nations had of doing the same.
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2 hours ago, Charles the Tyrant said:
This man has a point. What right do NPO and co have to state how anyone else should play this game? I've seen Roq and Keshav state that they aren't playing by Coal A's rules as part of their reasoning for prolonging this war and that they shouldn't expect the same courtesy we have provided them in previous wars when it came to ending them promptly. By that same token, why should we have to abide by whatever rules NPO wishes to impose on playing style?
We have no right. Metagame rules are formulated by a combination of persuasion and force, not by right.
However, no one has any right to have their preferred rules for warfare and diplomacy ratified by anyone else. Coalition A chose, piecemeal and over time, to ignore the desires and objections of the core of Coalition B. That's fine since we don't have a right to be listened to, but it did have consequences. You didn't persuade us and, because we're not micros or pixel huggers, you can't force us to acquiesce to your demands. We, on the other hand, may well force you to acquiesce to ours before this is over because, unlike you, we probably have the military muscle to finish the job.
Maybe consider that the next time someone tells you they have a half-baked idea for a new metagame that they're sure no reasonable person could object to.
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11 minutes ago, REAP3R said:
According to yourself, it was already slanted in 'our' favor to peace. You were never truly planning to pursue peace and is evidenced by the war still ongoing 7 months later, dragging in more and more participants. You standing here and continuing to defend your absurd terms is why your allies will continue to ditch you.
Peace is in your favor to the extent that it isn't synonymous with your coalition's comprehensive defeat. Roq's earlier quip about handing us $50 billion in exchange for immediate peace was to illustrate this. Unless there is a substantial adjustment of the vast, long-term economic disparities between the opposing coalitions, either in the form of an amenable peace agreement or continued war, we're not interested in ending this.
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7 minutes ago, lightside said:
If this happened this would count as slot filling and would be reported under the rules. So its not an issue
The burden of proof for slot filling is very high, it's easy to circumvent what restrictions do exist, and the mere incentive to slot fill (in the form of beige time) is problematic, including in Alex's view:
It's definitely an issue because, including in the eyes of the moderation staff, the current reporting and moderation system is flawed and inadequate.
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31 minutes ago, lightside said:
I disagree. There are much better solutions. For example this could bed fixed by just giving nations biege time when any war expires if the resistance the nation has is below a certain amount(or maybe even to whatever nation has less resistance). While not applying loot/infra damage as no one won the war. This would be like the united nations enforcing a ceasefire in a war and stopping future conflict for a short time. This would incentivize winning the war instead of just not ending it. Effectively this would allow bieges to serve there original purpose
That doesn't fix the slot-filling issues, and it would actually exacerbate them. Under that formulation, instead of just the losing nation getting some free beige from a bunch of 1 ship attacks by a friendly "enemy," both friendly nations would get free beige.
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40 minutes ago, Jeric said:Damn it he beat me to it...
I guess congrats or goodluck? Idk I'm terrible at paying attention to what's going on.
Well, I think your current socially acceptable response options are:
a) Alex needs to disband/delete [alliance of person at whom the statement is directed]
b) yOu'Re LiTeRaLlY kILliNg ThE gAmE
c) You're paranoid, [insert topic of discussion here] isn't real and/or never happened
d) I'm a micro in need of validation, so I'm declaring war on you
e) I don't like your alliance, so I hope someone steals your password and your alliance's back. For the Health of the GameTM.
Hope that helped.
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Vulgar Nation Name
in Game Reports
Posted · Edited by Edward I
https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=132805
I really doubt the first word is a typo.